Teach People How to Read Their Bibles

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Ligon Duncan

And I am seeing younger people saying, Hey, I actually want to hold a Bible in my hand. Want to hold a hymnal in my hand, and I want to read things off of a page. And so I do think we’ve got an opportunity to win a generation back to Bible reading, if we give them a little bit of help. So I’m glad you picked the topic, Matt, for us to talk about,

Matt Smethurst

welcome friends to the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. I’m Matt smitherst and I’m LIG Duncan. I’m coming to you from Richmond, Virginia. LIG, are you there in Jackson? I’m

Ligon Duncan

in Jackson today, and I enjoyed seeing some clips of your preaching at Southern Seminary.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, I had the opportunity to this sounds like we planned. I’m realizing this sounds like we planned this. Didn’t plan to mention this. This is totally this is totally off the cup. Look at us. Just two everyday pastors just spit balling. Yes, but was honored to speak in chapel at Southern Seminary, my alma mater, and very grateful for their influence in my life and my work as a pastor.

Ligon Duncan

The clip that I first saw, by the way, Matt, was the one where you’re talking about the early Christians praying for Peter and for James, and you say and Peter shows up at the door and James loses his head, and God was in charge of both of those things. And you had one of those patented Matt Smith or phrases that I enjoy so much. Can you remember what it was that you said about Peter and about James in that circumstance?

Matt Smethurst

Well, yes, acts 12, the church is praying that that James would be spared and that Peter would be spared. And the whole chapter is about Peter’s miraculous escape from prison. And I said one application is that God doesn’t always answer prayer the way we want. And this is a moment as a preacher where I know you’re tracking with me if you look a little confused, because isn’t the application from this story of Peter’s miraculous escape, absolutely that God answers prayer the way we want. Yes for Peter, but what about for James? They’re praying for both brothers. One gets beheaded, the other shows up at the door, and God was no less in control and no less good when it came to James’s fate compared to Peter. So yeah, every every time I think about that passage, it actually convicts me afresh of how I can trust God with an asterisk, rather than really laying my request at his feet, trusting he knows better.

Ligon Duncan

Is a really good clip from the sermon. People could just Google Matt Smith or Southern Seminary, you know, and it’ll probably pop up because that, that clip I saw, it circulated in a lot of different places. Really edifying. Be a good two minutes of encouragement for for our listeners, well, it’s kind

Matt Smethurst

of you to mention that LIG and speaking of Southern, we are at the TGC national conference at the end of April. You and I will be doing a live recording of the everyday pastor over lunch on april 23 and it’s going to be sponsored by our friends at Southern. So we would encourage any listeners who will be in Indianapolis for that conference, please go ahead and register as soon as you can. It’s $20 Lunch is provided, and we would love to get to spend that time with you. Yeah, well, I feel like we can just close in prayer now, if we got all those housekeeping items out of the way that weren’t even planned, Kendra, our multimedia superstar, is probably very happy that we mentioned that that lunch coming up. She’s done so much good work on this podcast, including coordinating that event. But like, I want to talk with you for the next few minutes about how to train our people to read their Bibles. Well, something we’ve mentioned on a previous episode is that a mark of good preaching is not wowing people, such that they leave thinking, wow, he’s amazing. I would have never seen that in the in the text. But rather, man, I want to read my Bible this week, if I only pay more careful attention to God’s word, I’ll see things like that as well. And so not only from the pulpit, but also just in the ordinary course of discipling ministry, how can pastors Think well about training people to approach God’s Word in a healthy way?

Ligon Duncan

Well, I mean, one of the tricks, Matt is just getting people to read their Bibles in the first place. You know, I think we’re really thinking about how to read the Bible well, but before you can get to reading the Bible, well, you have to start reading the Bible. And so I think building up a desire in our congregation for Bible reading is something that we. Need, I mean, we really need to rebuild that in our time. I think we’ve, we’ve gone through a period of time where there’s been sort of a low key, antinomian reaction to, you know, quiet times and devotionals. And I don’t have to read my Bible every day to be a good Christian. And why would I be legalistic about reading the Bible every day, and I’m actually seeing in the generations younger than we are, either you, you and me, a hunger. Hey, help help me know how to do this. I actually want to read my Bible. Help me know how to do that. So I’m seeing churches do a lot of different things. I the church that I used to pastor has been doing a a congregational Bible reading plan every year the last couple of three years where they they, hey, let’s do this together, and we’ll, we’ll read through the Bible together, and we’ll be able to talk about it. We’ll have some spots in the calendar year where the church talks about what we are actually working through at that time period, and let’s do it together. And I’m seeing different churches try to do things to help their people get started reading the Bible again, helping people learn the glories of having your own print copy of the Bible that you take to church and that you use as your main source of Bible reading. I’m very thankful that we have things like iPads and others that that where we can access the Bible. But man, there’s nothing like having your own physical copy of the Bible that you mark up and make notes in. And so just getting people to read the Bible is the first step to helping them read the Bible well and and then recognizing they’re going to be some parts of the Bible that are really hard for them to get through. I recently interviewed Michael Morales, who has written both on Leviticus and Numbers. And you know, those are places where Bible reading plans go to die. And so having some ways to help people through some of the harder bits of the Bible as a part of an overall Bible reading plan are really important in just getting people to read the Bible again. I do want us to talk about some specific helps along the way, but I tell people that my feel is that fewer people in our congregations are reading the Bible than were reading the Bible 40 years ago, regularly between Sundays and I think that’s one reason why scripture reading in public worship is really important, because a lot of real Christians are reading their Bible less now than they were a while ago. So what are you doing to help people read the Bible? Just read the Bible. Not even read it. Well, what are you doing to help people read the Bible at River City Baptist Church?

Matt Smethurst

Well, I’m again trying to first and foremost model in my preaching how to understand, interpret, apply. I have a mid week meeting with church members where we’re looking at that passage and kind of studying it together. And that’s a form of discipleship I’m obviously learning from them. But I’m also trying to example how we want to approach God’s Word on its own terms in a way that that is responsible. Are you doing that before or after you preach it on Tuesdays? I We have service review, which reviews everything that happened on Sunday, and members can speak into the various elements of the service. But we also have sermon preview, and that’s where we’re studying the next passage. One of the things LIG actually, that I’ve found helpful in my own life and with others, especially if they’ve grown sluggish and numb to the glories of Scripture, is just reminding them what a miracle it is that we even have the Bible. So of course, there are miracles in the Bible, but there is also the miracle that is the Bible, the fact that God, the maker of heaven and earth, would deign to speak to us, to as one theologian said, to forfeit his personal privacy, to reveal Himself to us, not leaving us to speculation, but giving us the gift of revelation so that we can know Him. This is something we’ve talked about in previous episodes, but you referenced earlier how much of a gift it is that we have our personal copies of God’s Word. I’d love to hear you, as a historian, put that in perspective, how unique is that in the history of the Christian church? Because I think you’re exactly right when you say that our members probably given our distracted age and how inundated we are with all kinds of. Of information and trivia and images and all these kinds of things. We’re probably reading our Bibles less than previous generations, and yet, we have more Bibles on the shelf than any previous generations. It’s an embarrassment of riches. But yeah, we do. How would you put it in perspective? How good we have it. Well,

Ligon Duncan

I mean, what one is really, it’s only been for about 500 years that that just your, your regular church member, has been able to have a copy of the Bible, and maybe, maybe even 300 years just because of the cost the the invention of the printing press in the late fifth, late 1400s It was huge for the Protestant Reformation, and it really gave the practical ability for the scriptures to have a leg up on the church’s Magisterium. Because, you know, in the in all the way through the Middle Ages, the only place there would have been a church Bible that you could access would have been chained to a pillar in a church and and so you really did have to depend upon whatever scripture was being quoted in the mass and what the church said, mostly orally, for you to form your understanding of what the Bible said about different things. And once the Bible is in print, you start have having more people than ever before be able to study the scriptures for themselves. And so that’s why you had the expressions of Tyndall and the Lollards, their their desire that the plow boy would be able to have access to the scriptures and study it for himself. That was an aspiration of the whole Protestant Reformation, to get the Bible into the hands of the people, because that actually allows you to have a sola scriptura culture where the Bible is functionally the sole final authority of faith and practice when everybody can read it. And so as costs keep coming down from the late 1400s to the 1500s to the 1600s and it becomes common for people to have, for instance, in England, a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer, or in the times of the pure in the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, or the Bible and pilgrims. Progress, you start to have a culture where, amongst Protestants, everybody has a Bible in the home, and everybody’s reading the Bible, and it’s a big deal. And people are excited about that. It was revolutionary when people in Zurich heard uric zingli preach through Matthew, they’d never heard anything like this. People were crowding in to hear the Gospel of Matthew preach. All of us today that believe in expository preaching should just wish that we had that kind of response of excitement from our people. But but correspondingly to that, just like you said that you’re trying to preach through the text, to encourage people to read through the text, it did build this hunger. Hey, I really want to understand the Bible for myself. And then I do think we went through a period in the in the 70s, and then into the 80s and in the 90s, and into the early 2000s where a variety of a variety of technological realities in our culture dulled us now because we’re so inundated with screens, I’m seeing younger people excited about books again and about handwriting things again. I just saw a young woman who has 100,000 followers on Instagram talk about how life changing it had been for her to write down scripture passages just verbatim with her pen and her her pad. And I am seeing younger people saying, Hey, I actually want to hold a Bible in my hand. I want to hold a hymnal in my hand, and I want to read things off of a page. And so I do think we’ve got an opportunity to win a generation back to Bible reading, if we give them a little bit of help. So I’m glad you picked the topic, Matt, for us to talk about. Do you remember a book? This is this book is older than you, but there a book came out from InterVarsity press in the 1970s called Search the scriptures. And it was just a, basically a Bible reading plan. And it was a check, check the box Bible reading plan. It was about that thick, and it had sort of a brown cover to it. And that became my first Bible reading plan. It was only after that that I discovered the Robert Murray MC chain Bible reading plan, which is pretty aggressive. It’s four chapters a day. And so you’ve got to be if you’re gonna do that one, you gotta be prepared to set aside some time in the morning and the evening to actually get through four chapters a day. But today, just every. Year, Justin Taylor at crossway releases a bunch of Bible reading plans towards the beginning of the year. He’ll do it, I guess he’ll post them again in late December, to help you, if you’re wanting to get to start in January, Ligonier does the same thing. They’ll release a bunch of Bible reading plans. Crossway will release a bunch of Bible reading plans. So there’s a lot more material that was out there. I had never seen a Bible reading plan before when I was a teenager, and so that that InterVarsity search the Scripture thing really helped me. The Bible is a big book, and it’s got a lot of different kind of literature. And if you’re if you just start in Genesis, it’s a long time before you get to the New Testament. Reading plans that that sort of allow you to dip into different parts of Scripture can help you through that. If you’ve never read the Bible, and I look, I still meet seminarians that have never read through the Bible before, one of the things that I will say to prospective seminarians is the first thing you ought to do is read through the Bible, because you’re going to come to seminary and you’re going to study the Bible, it will help you if you have read all the way through the Bible before you’re sitting in front of experts who are taking you really deep into the Bible. And if that’s true of seminarians, it’s certainly true of church members,

Matt Smethurst

yeah, we have a lengthy questionnaire that we send to prospective elders, and before we ask them about various biblical convictions and matters of interpretation, we ask that same question, have you read through the entire Bible? You know, and I’m also sensing among the younger generation a desire for more structure and even more disciplined to be challenged and to be called to a kind of spirituality that has definition to it. I think that accounts for a lot of the popularity of the so called spiritual formation movement, and authors like John Mark comer, young people are wanting to be called to a high standard when it comes to living in accordance with what Scripture holds out for us. But as I watch these conversations unfold, I think people are impoverishing themselves if they don’t look to the reformed tradition for a lot of the very help and guidance practically that they’re searching for because there’s so much fodder in the reformed tradition. Just look at the Puritans and how they didn’t treat the Bible contrary to popular misconceptions. They didn’t treat the Bible as some kind of cold, clinical thing in a lab, it was a source of deep meditation and delight, and we have the chance as pastors, to help recover the best of our own tradition, not assuming every pastor listening is in the reformed tradition, but we have the chance to to go back to deep wells from history When

Ligon Duncan

sort of this, this resurgence of reformed and evangelical Christianity started in the 60s and 70s, both in Britain America, it had maybe started even a little earlier in Australia, along came Bible expositors who were really encouraging young people to get into the scriptures. Jim Packer was writing, John Stott was writing, RC Sproul was writing, we can go down a list of people that were generating material to get young people into the into their Bible. So not long after Jim Packer wrote knowing God, RC Sproul wrote knowing scripture. And then there were other helps like that started coming out for young people to study. And so I was the beneficiary of that. There was a, there was a an older Dutch, reformed minister in America that started writing a Bible Commentary after he had already retired from the Ministry a man named William Hendrickson, and he produced a popular volume called survey of the Bible.

Matt Smethurst

I loved his comment when I preached through mark, his commentary was tremendous. But I don’t think many know of it, no,

Ligon Duncan

and it’s they’re bigger, and they’re definitely for preachers, but his little book, survey of the Bible. That’s one of the books that I went to even in seminary to try and get a better handle on every book in the Bible. He gives an outline for every book in the Bible. He sort of walks you through the main themes of every book of the Bible. He talks about problem passages in the Bible and how you handle that. He gives a little bit of basic kind of I’m sure what we’re going to talk about, what are some principles of interpreting the Bible that will help me do justice to Hey, I know when I’m reading a gospel that I’m reading a different kind of piece of literature than when I’m reading an epistle in the New Testament. And I know when I’m reading a gospel, I’m reading a different kind. Of literature that I’m reading when I’m reading a psalm, and I know that when I’m reading Isaiah, I’m reading a different kind of literature than when I’m reading the book of Judges. So what do I do? Am I supposed to read? He just helped me with some basic stuff like that. And then evangelicals started producing a bunch of volumes like that, like you may know the name of a well known Baptist evangelist and apologist named John Blanchard, who was actually from the Channel Islands in in England, and for a long time, just traveled all over the place doing evangelistic preaching and apologetics and such. He wrote a book called How to Enjoy your Bible. And that was another book that it was designed just to give basic help to believers. How do I read the Bible? Well? And yeah, and that. And I loved the title, and he actually talks about why, because, you know, it’s not some chore that you’re that you’re having to be forced to read the Word of God. It’s This is God’s word to you, just like you said at the beginning of the podcast, this is God’s word to us. This is an exciting thing to get to read. I just want to read it. Well, yeah, we

Matt Smethurst

and our people are not going to approach God’s word with a hungry desperation if we have forgotten that it’s where we can meet and engage with the living God. He meets us in the pages of His Word through the power of His Holy Spirit, and He wants us to experience him, to enjoy Him, to enter into the very happiness of the Triune God. And he does that through beckoning us into a two way conversation that he has initiated at the risk of being self referential. One resource that I wrote actually for Christians who are intimidated by the Bible, because I think that’s actually where a lot of our people are. They love the Bible, they affirm its importance. They sign our doctrinal statements. They’re familiar with certain parts of it. But the reason Bible reading plans sputter out so often is because it’s just a daunting book. It’s an ancient book. And so I wrote a little book a few years ago called before you open your Bible, and I tried to make it as accessible as possible. In fact, our youth group in our church is going through it right now, and it’s just looking at different heart postures that are kind of necessary in order to approach our Bibles well and get the most out of them. I talk about approaching the Bible prayerfully, humbly, desperately, studiously, obediently, knowing that’s going to lead to being able to approach it joyfully, expectantly, communally. And I want to double click on that in a moment. And then the fancy word Christo centric Lee, understanding that, you know, Jesus is the hero and the point of the whole thing, but it’s the communally one, which was just my attempt to find an adverb that sort of fit the sing songy Table of Contents, but that’s a way of saying, don’t just do this alone. You are going to sputter out if you don’t enlist the help of other brothers and sisters that God has placed in your life, most likely, in your church, that are probably also struggling more than you may think they are with sluggishness, maybe with being daunted by God’s word. So reach out to someone in your church. Pastor, you can encourage your people to do this. Reach out to someone in your church and say, Hey, can we just hold one another accountable, even if it’s just reading one chapter a day, maybe sharing one thing that we were encouraged by one thing we had a question about, and one other resource I want to commend is by Matthew Harmon. It’s a 2017, crossway book he wrote called asking the right questions, a practical guide to understanding and applying the Bible. In terms of understanding the Bible, we need to be asking questions like, what do we learn about God? What do we learn about people? What do we learn about relating to God? What do we learn about relating to others? And then, in applying the Bible, He commends questions like, What does God want me to understand? What does he want me to believe? What does he want me to desire, and what does he want me to do? And that brings us, like kind of into this larger conversation about biblical hermeneutics. How do we disciple our people to interpret and apply their Bibles? Well, what, what did you do at first pres in that regard? Well,

Ligon Duncan

let me start simply with a thinking of myself as a teenager, I had good models in the pulpit, Matt, you know, and so I saw how my pastors were handling the Bible in the pulpit, and it did help me read the Bible better, and they were quoting people that helped me, too, my boyhood pastor, Gordon Reed, probably. The month didn’t go past when he didn’t mention Martin Lloyd Jones. And so one of the first books I read as a young person was Martin Lloyd Jones studies and Sermon on the Mount. So from the modeling of a good pastor in the pulpit, handling the word well, it should encourage his people. And I didn’t know that much. I mean, I should have known more than I did with as good parents as I had, and as good pastors and as good Sunday school teachers as I had, but, boy,

Matt Smethurst

how much is lost on us. Myself completely true,

Ligon Duncan

and I still, you know, I think that if, and I’ve been surprised how many lay people listen to this, I thought that only pastors were going to listen to the everyday pastor, but I keep running into lay people that are listening to this. So please, know lay people. I to this day, I’m 64 years old. I’ve been studying the Bible professionally for, you know, close to 50 years and and I regularly run across things in the passage where I go, I don’t know what that means, and I’m very quick to go to Resources from people that are older, wiser, more godly than I am, who helped me interpret it. I again, just talking to Michael Morales very recently. He taught me I’ve preached through the book of Numbers, and he taught me things about the book of Numbers that I did not know, that just made my heart sing. So don’t be discouraged when you don’t understand something that’s going to become something that’s a blessing to you later on, you just mark it off. I didn’t understand that. Come back to it later. It’s going to be a blessing to you sometime later, every and

Matt Smethurst

once you understand it for the first time, that doesn’t mean you’ll always remember. I feel like a lot of being a pastor is trying to remember what I believe about something. So in fact, my my next sermon is the little passage in First Peter three on Jesus preaching to the spirits in hell. And, oh, by the way, baptism saves you. And I’m kind of having to shake off the rust and go back and think, Okay, what do I believe about this? I’ve thought about it before, but it’s a constant journey. It’s sort of diving into God’s Word with the help of others. But I

Ligon Duncan

think you what happens is you’re able to go a little bit deeper every time, and then, then the recall comes like you I have, I’ve often, I’m coming to a passage I preached before, and I wonder what I said about that the last time, and I’ll, I’ll go back, and I’ll go, Huh, I didn’t know that. I knew that, you know. And but then you come back and you’ve learned more from other wise, godly people, or you’ve seen things in Scripture that you didn’t see before, and you take it slightly different angle, or you go a little bit deeper than you did before. I just had a friend preach on a passage that I had preached on about two months before, and he explained a part of it that I had just completely left alone. And I left it alone deliberately because I didn’t understand it. And I said, I’m gonna preach the part of this passage that I do understand, and but he did a great job of explaining the part of the passage that I didn’t understand. So I’m going to preach that passage again soon and preach both parts of it, because my friend helped me understand and and so lay people don’t get discouraged when you don’t understand everything in the passage. I don’t understand everything in the passage. Matt, so

Matt Smethurst

are you saying? Are you saying that next time you’re going to preach this passage, you’re going to say, see, this teaches that only believers should be baptized. Is that? Is that what you had

Ligon Duncan

to come? It had to come sooner or later. In this case, it was about God’s mercy and His justice as a revelation of His character. And I had, I had left alone the Justice part, because I didn’t know how the phraseology worked. It was an exodus 3334 passage, and I’ve read that passage 500 times now in my life, and I’ve benefited from it, and I’ve learned from it, but I still couldn’t tell you everything about it, there’s always something more to learn in the scriptures. If God is inexhaustible, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible keeps having some surprises for us as we keep reading through it. We

Matt Smethurst

ought to pray that our people would see that our own discovery of things in Scripture is an exhilarating adventure, and we haven’t grown tired of it. I say pray for that, because it is something you can fake. So we don’t. We don’t want to just act as if the Bible is this glorious book, when in reality, it’s just become something we do for a job, and that’s always a danger. But one of the best gifts we can give to our congregations is our own contagious love for and joy in God’s word. I’m reminded of an image that John Newton once used where he talks about two ways to read a will. You can read a will as an. Attorney is reading it, or as the heir is reading it. And we ought to approach scripture and read it, not just as an attorney reads a will, but as the heir reads it, because this is to use the old language that Newton deployed. This the Scripture is a description and proof of our interest. This is what God has for us in His love like anything else, on helping our people, read, interpret, apply scripture well that you want to come in as

Ligon Duncan

we could, one would just be study. Bibles are something that have helped me. I know that that’s not everybody’s favorite thing, but study especially if you’re a person that gets stuck on what do I do with this passage? What’s it? You know, the ESV Study Bible is a great resource. The recent NIV Study Bible that Don Carson edited is a great resource. The

Matt Smethurst

it’s called the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, yeah, exactly.

Ligon Duncan

Make sure you look at Da Carson is the is the general editor the Reformation Study Bible that that Ligonier did, is a great study Bible. I i almost always look at what those study Bibles say about a passage that I’m about to preach on, and they’re really good at summarizing things. They don’t give you a lot of commentary, but they can really help you understand what’s the literary category of this passage, what’s what are some of the main points, what are some of the connections with other passages of Scripture? There’s another es ESV has tons of different study Bibles. So the ESV did a study Bible called the literary study Bible that Phil reichen was involved in that I find really helpful to me. Another thing like the like the William Hendrickson survey of the Bible, that I have found super helpful is reichens Bible Handbook. And again, that’s Phil reichen, his dad, who was an English professor, Leland Reich and and then a Christian educator named Jim Wilhoit. And they have a survey of every book of the Bible, and they try to bring in quick literary comments about each portion of Scripture, a good outline of the Bible. Great quotes about that Bible book, and some key themes in each Bible book. And I love that particular book, and it helps me a lot. As I’m if I’m getting ready to do a series on a Bible book, I’ll look at that and see how they’ve dealt with it. So study Bibles can be a real help make sure you get a good one, like some of the ones that we’ve mentioned here. But that can be a real help. And even though sometimes they may be so big you don’t want them to be your main Bible that you’re carrying around, I love having those kinds of resources. It can help you understand a passage that’s perplexing you.

Matt Smethurst

And also, one volume Bible commentaries can be really good to come into lay people. I like the new Bible Commentary. Da Carson was one of the editors of that the Puritan Matthew Henry has a classic one volume Bible Commentary. Any other resources you’d want to add to the list you’ve already given

Ligon Duncan

Yeah, I use those and find them helpful. The people, as you say, the new Bible Commentary Don pulled together so many sort of stellar evangelical people to work on that. A lot of times you’re reading Alec Mateer when you’re reading that, and Alec is just so good. So that’s a good one that I like. One thing about the Matthew Henry for people to know, it’s six volumes now there are, there are sort of annotated, abridged editions of it, but it’s big, and Matthew Henry only wrote through where does his part end like is it acts or Romans where, and then he passes away. And then his friends take his notes, his extant sermon notes, and finish it out to the end. But there’s some real gold in Matthew Henry to Plum and, let me say Spurgeon. You know, if you, if you have Spurgeon on the Psalms, just tremendous stuff there. So there are shorter things that you can get hold of like that that can be very, very helpful for understanding the Bible. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst

and there’s a another podcast I actually would want to commend at this point, and that is Bible talk by our friends at nine marks. Jim Hamilton, seminary professor, Sam Ahmadi, local church pastor in Louisville and Alex Duke, also an elder writer, but he’s kind of the host of it, those three brothers. Are working chapter by chapter through the entire Bible, and it’s a really stimulating conversation. And Alex has actually written a book from Eden to Egypt, which is just on the book of Genesis, but it’s drawing from a lot of those insights that were originally shared in Bible talk, and he’s only expanded it and made it better. And I’m telling you, I did not go into this conversation even thinking about Bible talk or Alex’s book, but I trust the spirit has brought them to mind, because when I read Alex’s book not too long ago, I thought, if there is someone in my church who has grown sluggish in their love for God’s word, perhaps because they’re intimidated by it. This little book sings they should just read the book of Genesis alongside from Eden to Egypt. And if that doesn’t stir their affections and their their their love for God’s word, then I don’t know what will so Bible talk is a great podcast, as well as that book by Alex. We’ve mentioned so many resources in this episode, and we don’t apologize for it. One of the things we want to do on the everyday pastor is point you, not just to our work, but more importantly, to the work of those who are helping us. Because so much of being a pastor is being a treasure hunter and trying to find help as we all try to be better equipped for uncovering the treasures in God’s Word. Amen. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the everyday pastor. LIG and I are grateful for everyone who takes the time to listen. Please share this with someone else that may find it instructive or encouraging, because we want to help pastors and lay people find fresh joy in the work of ministry and in the reading of God’s Word.